Well I have to start with rugby. I think Joe Schmidt when he was interviewed after the match was fully correct when he said, “it’s a reality check for all of us,” and by that he meant the team and himself as head coach. How true that was. Somehow we, the public, and I expect the team also, felt that we were poised to defeat England. We didn’t at all take into account that England under Jones were bound for revenge, and they got it.

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As I am compiling this weekly column for the Advertiser, people in the US are voting in the mid-term elections for both the House of Representatives and the Senate. So by the time my column appears the results will be fully out. I hope that the polls which are forecasting Democratic wins in the House of Representatives are correct, but of course our belief in polls has run low. President Trump has put a huge effort into shoring up the Republican seats in both the Congress and the Senate, and he has campaigned tirelessly for the last 10 days hoping to consolidate the Republican vote. It seems that the US is viewing these mid-term elections as a referendum on President Trump and his handling of the US. So it will be very intriguing to see the results and to see whether the Democrats will come back in charge of the House of Representatives.

Well, we will all be voting for the presidency this coming Friday. It seems to me that none of the candidates apart from the incumbent have really caught hold of the imagination of the people. Yes they have worked very hard, and yes they have performed on TV and on radio, and they have really done their very best to appeal to us, the voters. But somehow it has not come off, and it seems, if opinion polls are to be believed, that the incumbent Michael D. Higgins is the person to whom the majority of voters will give their allegiance on voting day.

This has been a tremendously interesting week. Before we begin on our usual chat and conversation, there is one item which is outstanding and which we simply should reflect upon, and that is the rescue of the 12-member boys soccer team and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand.